A woman has been found dead in Yosemite National Park. It looks like an accident: a fall from the top of El Capitan. But Agent Kyle Turner (Eric Bana) isn’t so sure. “She was hurt, scared,” his new partner Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) says in a new trailer for UNTAMED, a limited series coming to Netflix this July. “She was running from something.” 

What was this mystery woman running from? That’s the question at the heart of UNTAMED, a series from creators Mark L. Smith (American Primeval, The Revenant) and Elle Smith (The Marsh King’s Daughter). In some ways, it’s the ideal challenge for Bana’s haunted ranger. “Kyle Turner is someone who is much more comfortable in the wild […] than he is with other humans or with the modern world,” Mark L. Smith tells Tudum.

Bana, who also executive produced the series, was the first choice for the role, “because he’s just so good at playing silence,” Mark continues. “He can do so much with his face and his eyes.”

“He can do strength and sensitivity at the same time, which we felt was really rare,” Elle Smith adds. “And he looks good on a horse.”

Bana’s Turner is a man at war, not just with the wilderness, but with himself. Turner has his own past to reckon with, including a case he feels he failed to follow through on. “What we’re seeing happen in real time is the grief that he’s going through, but also what he can do for the next girl, what he can do for this case, and how can he serve her family by solving this case,” Elle says. 

The wilderness Turner investigates features its share of dark corners, from an itinerant tent village to a rogue wildlife management officer (played by Wilson Bethel) with whom he has a history. “In a lot of these parks, people visit about 3%, 4% of the actual land,” Elle says. “You see the village and you see the main points, but you don’t get into the back country and you don’t really see the mass square footage of the place.”

Yosemite is “the size of Rhode Island, and people only know such a tiny speck of it,” Mark says. “I love stripping all the cheats away, stripping all the more modern tools that people can use. I feel like it really gets down to the character and what they can find within themselves.”

Yosemite’s sprawling size is a problem echoed by characters in the trailer. “We have close to a million acres of wilderness,” chief park ranger Paul Souter (Sam Neill) notes. That’s a lot of ground to cover — and a lot of places for a killer to hide. 

You can read more about UNTAMED here, and stay tuned for all episodes of the new series to drop on Netflix on July 17.